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A while back I noted my unpleasant reaction to Dole bananas. While I suspect the intolerance is specific to certain strains of banana, I have been avoiding all bananas to be on the safe side.

At the same time, I’ve been dying to have grandma’s wonderful banana cake again. After cracking my head as to a suitable replacement for banana (what has the same consistency?), I decided to try pumpkin.

And the result was fabulous!! The taste had the same underlying flavours as the banana version, but with an added creamy richness from the pumpkin.

I used wholewheat flour, which gave a slightly gritty texture that my friend mistook for semolina/sugee.

Instead of the 115g instructed by the original recipe, I put in 60g — definitely more than sweet enough. Although my tendency is to reduce the sugar as much as possible in most recipes, I recently read that sugar grains help to create pockets of air that make the cake light and airy when baked. So far using a little as 1/4 the recommended amount of sugar has worked well for me, but I wonder if my baking would have turned out with better texture more of the time if I wasn’t so radical with the sugar reduction.

I used quite a lot of pumpkin, probably equal to the volume of two bananas. This produced a close-textured cake that was at the same time extremely soft and moist. Will definitely be doing this one again!